Rob's Life: That's all for now folks!

So this is it: my last night in town. It's finally here and I'm feeling a bit bewildered. Someone asked me the other night how long I'd been here and I had to literally count the months on my fingers to make sure it really was only two: "20th Feb to the 20th March, 20th March to the 20th April. Yeah, just two months."

It's such a nest of cliches, talking about the passage of time. It's either flying by or it seems like years. But there's no way around it: it feels like just absolutely forever ago that I first arrived in the country on a boat from Italy, all excited to see Greek writing on the road signs.

It's not the memory's job to measure out spans of time, so we shouldn't be surprised when we're struck by time being either longer or shorter than it feels. But really I'm tempted to say that my current "feeling" of time, the one where Feb seems a long time ago, is the more true-to-reality of the two: an hour is a long time, and a day has got lots of them. And since 60 is a pretty big number, so sixty days really is a long time. The scary side-effect of this is how much of our normal lives our memory feels perfectly fine about fast-forwarding over in the average two month period.

A wise friend of mine once said that she wants a life "made up of one nice day at a time", rather than a life with any big sweeping themes. I wonder whether living like that also feels less like an onrushing of weeks flying by, and would instead get us closer to the feeling that life is long.

So the last few days has been a whirlwind of goodbyes to the randomly assorted cast of places and characters which have made up my life over the last 60 days. The first goodbye was to the students and staff at the NGO I've been teaching at. One of the students asked that I bring my guitar in for the last lesson, and learn Simply The Best, a song which had become our class anthem after we learned about "good/better/best". I practised hard to two days then did a belting Tina Turner rendition while they were doing fill-in-the-blanks exercises. As my dad would say, that's got to be a first for Athens refugee NGOs.

We had cookies in the classroom, and a couple of staff members and I went to the pub afterwards. A lovely little feeling of being part of something for a while.

It's also been a few days of big nights out. In the ex-pat world which swirls permanently around the language school, and around its warm and wonderful founder Magda, there suddenly arrived some Germans who wanted to stay up Very Late Indeed and I've been caught up in their slipstream. On Friday I, an Australian man and the two jet-fuelled Germans went to a hipster beer place, out for mezze, then out-out in Exarcheia, the anarchist punk/incredible gentrification area of the city slightly on a hill. It was to be the first of two consecutive post-5am bedtimes for your middle-aged correspondent.

I think it's probably been for the best that this kind of break-yourself-via-too-much-fun model of travelling hasn't been available hitherto. God knows what state I'd be returning in if it had.

In between all this drinking and dancing, I've also said my fond goodbyes to the good people at the English Theatre I've been volunteering at. The three Greek people who work there seem basically to have taken me on as a beloved member of the family, and the Latvian/Israeli owner and impressario continued to aloof and odd. An anecdote or two about him is worth telling, but I'll save that for IRL. But how striking is the welcome I got from the Greek people there! It's the most un-theatre thing ever and I enjoyed being showered with love for one last evening. Maybe I'll return with a production one day.

See you in the UK dear reader, thanks for following along for this little bout of blogging. I really appreciate it!